Today we’re going to discuss logo and brand guidelines.
Have you ever seen a company’s logo which has been stretched and squeezed it doesn’t look the best does it. Now imagine if that was your logo and you’d spent time and effort to get the perfect design and the perfect brand identity for your business or your service or your product and then you hand it over to someone. They take it the put it in an advert and they squash it to make it fit I can imagine it’s not going to make you happy.
So how can we stop that or prevent that from happening? this is where Logo and brand guidelines come in. These are documents that set out rules and guidelines on how people should use your brand assets like your logo without having these guidelines in place it’s quite easy for other designers to take your assets and make them fit their design rather than thinking about how their design should fit around your brand assets
So what are logo guidelines
logo guidelines are are the bare minimum of what you should have after you’ve had a logo designed these will cover things like the minimum size that your logo should be reproduced in the colors Pantone, C.M.Y.K., R.G.B. on the hexadecimal for the web it will specify the fonts which are used in your logo and potentially also the forms that need to be used for headings on body copy any documents or web pages with your logo will appear and it should also give some spacing and exclusion zones so it should say.
“if you’re using this logo Please allow X. amount of pixels or millimeters of space around your logo so that it doesn’t look like it has been squeezed by all the content around it by having these logo guidelines you can send them out to any external designer or subcontractor who is creating any brand materials for you they can then look at these guidelines and make sure that they follow any rules or conditions that you have surrounding your logo design
logo guidelines are quite simple the next step up from that are brand guidelines and these are much more comprehensive these cover everything to do with your brand things like that your brand’s vision history its personality tone of voice,
- Your brand’s vision
- history of the business
- Personality and tone of voice
- Stationery and marketing materials
- Imagery
- Photography
- Advertisements
- Editorial guidelines
- How should promotional materials Look
- Merchandising
- Website design,
- Social media pages
Depending on the size of your business or how early on you are in your business you may not require brand guidelines at this point but you should at the very least have logo guidelines if you are going to go down the brand guidelines route yes they are comprehensive but you also want to allow some flexibility in there this will allow designers to be creative with your brand Now they won’t squash and stretch your logo but it will allow them to look at your branding and still keep that brand consistency but allow new ideas and some originality to come into your brand so that it never gets stale it’s always exciting developing moving with what your audience and your customers are wanting.
Below I have included some links to some brands. Guidelines from some world famous brands by looking at these Brand guidelines you’ll see that they all have a similar purpose to Brand consistency.
In summary, having a simple set of logo guidelines is better than nothing at all why put in the effort and the time to create the perfect logo if you have nothing in place to stop other designers taking your logo including it in some other marketing materials and changing it that’s definitely not what you want to happen. If you have a logo but you don’t have any logo guidelines I strongly suggest you go back and speak to the designer that created your logo and ask them to create some for you they’re the best person to do that.
If you’re no longer in touch with the designer who created your logo originally then other graphic designers should still be able to help you out. I hope this short article has given you an insight into the importance of logo and brand guides it is something that you really should have and you should be discussing with your graphic designer if you don’t have any right now.
For designers out their Graham Smith – The Logo Smith has a nice template you can download and use if you don’t have your own setup.